February 20, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-02-19

Hi. I'm Joseph Zitt. I moved from the US to Israel in 2017. This is my newsletter about more-or-less daily life in my city in the shadow of war. You can select these links to subscribe or unsubscribe. There are more links at the bottom. You can also read this email online here. Here we go...

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Yesterday, messages pop up on several Facebook groups. There are scattered power outages all over.

People wonder if it's happening to the whole country. It isn't. They wonder if it's a cyberattack, According to government, it's not. There has been a "production malfunction" of some sort in a power station that has triggered problems elsewhere.

I see a "breaking news" announcement about it in one of our newspapers, but can't find it as I write this. The only¹ articles² I find are from sites outside the country.

It doesn't affect us at work. When I get home, though, I find that our power had gone out. My one standalone clock has reset. My computer's peripherals aren't responding, though the laptop itself is unaffected. I add a UPS to my tech shopping list.

I reboot the laptop. Everything comes back to life. To my surprise, that includes my second external monitor. I thought it had died in the last outage. For this, too, we give thanks.

The rain continues off and on. Today, as I go out to harvest my lunch at the supermarket downstairs from the office, it starts precisely as I go outside and stops precisely when I come back in. I wonder if I'm triggering the weather system through something on the door. Maybe it's built into the mezuzah.³

Some time ago, I tried to figure out if there was a way to go from the office to the store without going outside. There isn't. A single level of the underground parking is blocked off for the supermarket. It has its own interior staircase and elevator. I'm guessing that it has its own bomb shelter. Fortunately, I haven't had to find out.

Our city has announced that a section of the shore is being set aside as a "quiet beach." The students of a local school came up with the plan for people with "invisible disabilities" such as those on the autistic spectrum.⁴

As an article on a local news site says (via Google Translate):

" In the quiet complex, a communication board was placed that contains visual symbols that allow people with communication disabilities to express themselves by voting on the painting. In the complex, surfaces on the sand and shading facilities will be set up, and at the entrance to the complex, identification bracelets will be distributed on which a name and telephone number can be written, which will help to easily locate a person who is lost."

(I don't think "voting on the painting" is quite right. The Hebrew has havtza'ah al hatziur. The other translations that I find are even less plausible.)

Our National Security Nutjob has declared that access to the Temple Mount, which includes Al-Aqsa, will be off-limits to people from the Palestinian Authority below a specified age during Ramadan.⁵

Everyone seems to agree that that would be a bad idea. Our Attorney General doesn't think the age limitation would be legal. The foreign press is not having it.⁶

(That video has one heck of an ominous score. Shazam recognized it as "Devil's Organ"⁷ by one Jimena Contreras, from YouTube's royalty-free music library, which is a boon to zero-budget filmmakers and, apparently, news sites.)

The Prime Minister's office seemed at first to endorse the idea, but then walked it back. Media folks are saying that the whole thing might have been a publicity stunt to play to the hard right bloc.

An a cappella group in Malawi has recorded a video of the popular song Habayta in the original Hebrew.⁸

The members are Seventh Day Adventists and usually sing gospel, but were moved to record it when they heard the massive version recorded by hundreds of musicians in Caesarea, which I have posted before.⁹

At the end of the work day, I stop at the usual café for a sachlav. For most of the walk, it isn't raining. Right when I head out of the café, it starts up again. I think of heading back inside, but decide against it. If the rain is indeed starting and stopping based on where I am, I had better just walk on. Playing with the rain patterns would just annoy the cats.

Around here, you don't want to annoy the cats.

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Here’s an archive of past newsletters.

You can find me via email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and, just out of inertia, X/Twitter. There's more about me and my books, music, and films at josephzitt.com.

The newsletter’s official mailing address is 304 S. Jones Blvd #3567, Las Vegas NV 89107. (I’m in Israel, but if physical mail comes to me at that Las Vegas address, it’ll get scanned and emailed. I don’t expect that to happen much. If you want to send me physical mail, ask me for a real address.)

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L'hitraot.